Composed of three artists, two architects, a curator, and a scientist, our collective collaborates with the Altamira National Museum and Research Center. Situated in Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, on the northern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, the Cave of Altamira was discovered in 1868. The Museum showcases Paleolithic art and artifacts dating—for the oldest—from around 36,000 years ago.
The cave has indeed been closed to the public since 1977—besides for archaeologists and five lucky visitors a week—and is now observable only as a fac-simile in the museum named Neocueva. In this situation, we found ourselves unable to enter the cave. However, we explored the site more in-depth than any visitor, bringing our bodies closer to the ground. To understand this gigantic and entangled organism, we articulated a methodology through sensoriality and speculative fiction, alongside Chilean science fiction writer, Simón López Trujillo.
Interested in the deep time that this naturecultural place manifests, we investigate notions such as the absent, dichotomies between encounter and contagion, conservationism, decomposition, cohabitation, and the artificial through speculative endeavors that explore more-than-human perspectives and scales.
How to reach the invisible?
How to narrate the cave through other beings?
How to rethink our relationship with the places we inhabit, approximating more-than-human dynamics occurring in the cave?
How to blur the boundaries between living and inert?
We touch and smell the minerals once used as pigments in cave paintings. We slide and listen to the sound of the meadows. We dream, day and night, linking our imagination and unconsciousness with the collective experience of the territory.
Fascinated by the secret life of the infinite number of agents that cohabit in the cave and their environment: bacteria attached to the rock, fungi, insects, and animals. The water dripping inside. We seek to give voice and tell the multiplicity of latent stories in Altamira by making a cross-section of the geological, biological, and human strata that have existed – and will exist. Showing the delicate balance between the agents of the cave ecosystem as well as the apparatus separating them from the ecosystem of the museum, we found ourselves in an ecotone, an interphase from one domain to another. It is in perpetuating the sensorial adventure we have undertaken in Altamira that we now prepare a multi-agent narrative with interventions occupying all the thresholds of its territory.
Inspired by the Greek word trogli, meaning cave, and soma, body, TROGLOSOMA designates both the non-human bodies separated from the cave and the cave itself in a single body, a living ecosystem. TROGLOSOMA is our ongoing theoretical and practical research. It is shaped as diverse outcomes at different temporalities. It consists of formal and material experimentations as well as processes of sample collection, archival activations, and writing exercises. Its ultimate intention is to expand the research methodologies of the Altamira Museum and Research Centre, opening up for polyphonic, multi-sensorial, and multimedia narrations of the different agents involved in the Altamira cave and territory.